


In My Life

by loopyzoop



Category: Rooster Teeth/Achievement Hunter RPF
Genre: Character Death, Death, Grief/Mourning, M/M, Sad, Sad Ending, Sad Michael, i'm very very sorry
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-12
Updated: 2017-10-12
Packaged: 2019-01-16 08:57:46
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,987
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12339537
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/loopyzoop/pseuds/loopyzoop
Summary: They always said that Michael would never wear a suit, even when he got married. That just wasn't true.





	In My Life

**Author's Note:**

> So I'm not even really a part of the Rooster Teeth fandom anymore, don't really ship Mavin these days, haven't wrote for them in years, howeveeeer... I was going through my old laptop and found a super sad super random finished one shot that I wrote a couple years back? So I thought what the heck, it might make someone a little sad. So here it is! Comments/kudos appreciated very much as always!

Michael hated wearing a suit.

The single tuxedo in his closet had been pressed years ago, zipped into a bag and hung neglected in the back on a broken plastic hanger with very little caution. The only finger prints tainting the outer layer of dust came from moving it out of the way, shoved aside in a moment of panic when he couldn't decide what to wear to a job interview or a dinner party.

Even then, he didn't consider it. He had crinkled his nose at the very thought of it, pushing sweaters back in front of it as if to bury the idea in fabric and clothing and ever keep it from coming back.

The suit was a secret, only purchased for his sister's wedding when he was eighteen and forced to meet the standard of 'looking decent'. It mean that he couldn't wear a game t-shirt or blue jeans with a hole in the left knee anymore. If you were to ask anyone that claimed to know everything about Michael Jones, they would tell you that he had never even owned a tux. It was an old enemy of his - a foe that he had shoved into his rear view mirror, full of repressed memories of pinching corners and getting stuck with about a thousand pins while he got it tailored and he hadn't expected there to be a reason to ever face it again. He worked playing video games, for Christ's sake. Nobody there even believed that he could do better than a button down, and that seemed like a stretch for him.

So when he pulled it out, breaching the barrier that it had been contained within for dozens of months, Michael stared. He stared at the grey coating that did nothing to disprove the amount of time it had been abandoned, running a finger through it carefully, focusing on the dust left on the tip when he had finished. He unzipped the bag agonizingly slowly. The sound was almost deafening in the dead quiet of his room, and while he slipped it out he had to bite the inside of his cheek - hard.

It was a piece of clothing. It was simple, black and white, with no sentiments attached. Yet as he lifted it from its containment Michael felt himself breaking, piece by piece as he crumpled under the pressure. The thought that there had once been a running joke in the office, a joke that he would not see a suit and tie until his wedding day, was crowding and pushing at the recesses of his brain.

It wasn't even so much as a joke, but was thought of as a fact in his mind, up until the day he found out it wouldn't be true.

He was going to wear the suit at his best friend's funeral.

It was to be surrounded by weeping family and friends and ugly flower arrangements, absorbing the melancholy of a short life. The suit, which had never been adored to begin with, would have nothing good done for it as it sucked up the sadness of the day.

Michael ran his hands carefully over the fabric as he held it up in the pale morning light. It was supposed to feel soft and high quality. For the price of it, that was the expectation, but under his touch it almost felt sharp, adding to his reluctance to put it on.

He set it down on the bed yet again, turning around and adjusting the towel wrapped around his waist. The room around him was the result of mass destruction, evidence showing in every piece of clothing he had torn from his closet, every bottle or object from his dresser that he had hurled at the floor, and in the gaping hole by his bookcase where his fist had burst through the drywall in one punch.

Evidence that had gone untouched since the day he found out about Gavin. That day his phone rang four times as he tried to sleep.

The first time being a mild annoyance, the second irritating, the third infuriating, and the fourth devastating.

It's true that they say everybody grieves differently; that everyone copes with stress in a different way. While some are healthy, others could pull you apart strand by strand in a matter of months. Michael, however, didn't grieve at all. He just shut down.

He didn't talk for days. He had no reason to talk anymore, every word feeling as hollow and brittle as his chest, without someone that could really listen. He refused to sleep, too, spending hours in his bed but none of them resting as the phone rang every day. The number of calls slowly got smaller and smaller all week until they stopped coming completely. He only knew the date of the funeral from a short, choppy text from Geoff, dropped into his inbox sometime around 2 PM the day before. He hadn't ignored it like the rest, instead typing a reply that said he would be there and sending it off before rolling over and falling into an uneasy state of unconsciousness.

When he awoke it was sometime in the earliest hours of the morning, the rest of the world still slumbering on. He peeked through the curtains cautiously, seeing the streetlights hadn't shut off yet, before stumbling blindly into the bathroom and cranking the tap as hot as it would go.

The steam rose instantly, and Michael watched it. It swirled around him as he stepped a foot on to the cool shower floor and he found himself fascinated by the patterns it made. It was distracting - and that was what he liked about it.

Maybe that was all he would need: a distraction. He knew that is sounded self destructive, probably because it was, but perhaps he could continue on if only he could be transported somewhere else where he couldn't remember his name and he didn't have the capacity to know why he was trying to escape. He wondered if it was totally cliché to get himself black-out drunk, even though he never quite liked going past the point of tipsy before. Then again, he had never needed to be anything but tipsy before.

It wasn't tasteful to arrive at your own best friend's funeral hammered, however, and so Michael stepped into the shower.

The water was scalding and he could barely manage to lift his heavy arms to massage the shampoo into his hair which had been sitting in a state of disgusting greasiness for days. He never knew that basic hygiene could be such a fucking chore. Rinsing dirt off of himself had never been exhausting in the past.

When he finally stepped out a good forty five minutes later, the light of dawn was beginning to rise over the horizon and rooftops outside. It was a sunny, calm day. _A good day for a funeral_ , an unspoken voice agreed, and Michael fought it down as he towelled at his hair, hoping that if he shook his head hard enough the voice would find its way out of his head through his ears. Maybe he was going crazy. Maybe he should tell Geoff or Ray or somebody that he was hearing voices now that Gavin was gone, but he couldn't even manage to fathom how he would go about explaining that. _Yeah, hey guys, just so you know I'm completely fucking nuts now. No big deal or anything. Ha!_

He turned to his dresser in the still dark room, pulling a drawer out with a long sigh and fished around for a pair of boxers in the mismatched array of clothing - shirts, underwear, socks, anything you could imagine was crammed in that tiny space. As he pulled a particular favourite pair out - as if that could make up for the kind of day he would be having - he spotted a dark blue shirt laying against his hand out of the corner of his eye, and nearly crumbled. Michael swallowed hard, his throat closing.

It was simple, just a light brush of clothing against his wrist, but it made him feel as if his insides were a piece of paper, folding in on themselves over and over and over again until they were nothing but a crumpled, useless mess.

Gavin's t-shirt, left on his floor in a rushed, blurred, and forgotten hurry on a Saturday afternoon, sat tangled with one of his dark grey socks in the drawer. Michael shoved it back in, shaking his head and slamming it shut before turning back to his bed. He wasn't going to cry, not yet. Not over something that stupid. He couldn't.

Michael sat down at the edge of his bed, fists clenched together in a tight ball between his knees and his head bowed.

He never prayed. He was never really the religious type, not by most standards - he was loud, obnoxious, and far too vulgar for church according to any family members that every attempted to get him saved, but in that moment he really wanted to try. In the quiet, dust filled, torn apart bedroom that had become his reclusive hole of a home he began to pray for something - anything other than the gaping, open wound in his chest where the only person in the world for him used to be.

He stayed like that for what seemed like hours, and when he glanced at the clock again it was almost 8. He had spent more than two hours swimming in his thoughts, barely treading enough to keep his head above water. He thought about the things he knew he couldn't be thinking about later when he was in the church pews surrounded by people who barely knew Gavin. He thought about what Gavin would say if he could see his own funeral, but he wasn't quite sure if he would say anything at all. Despite his joking, when it came to things like that he was deadly serious.

Deadly was probably the wrong choice of words.

Michael took his time changing that morning, pulling a garment on and then pausing for breath before finally facing the suit that still lay tauntingly on his bed. He had never known that the fucking thing could cause so much trouble, but as he buttoned it slowly and without stopping, he felt the crushing weight of defeat. Some unwritten code inside of him had him convinced that if he could just put off wearing it he could wake up. He could wake up and Gavin would still be beside him, and that he could tell him about the horrible dream and crush him into a hug, pretending that it never happened. He could breathe in Gavin's scent and squeeze Gavin's hand and _just have Gavin again_. But instead he got dressed.

The tie was choking him.

The arms were too tight. The pants didn't feel right. He hated the crushing feeling that wasn't really the suit, but the hand that seemed to be wrapping itself around his heart, and yet he would still blame it on the stitches and fabric rather than think about what was really going on. He ignored the pang of regret he felt as he laced his shoe and he sure as hell ignored the feeling of his stomach in his throat when he saw himself in the mirror.

People said that even when Michael Jones got married, he would not be in a suit. It was a joke at the time, but perhaps they would end up right in the end. It was at that moment on a quiet, sad Saturday morning before a funeral for a young life cut short that he realized: the only person in the world he could imagine wearing a suit for again, the only person who deserved it when he walked down the aisle, was already gone.


End file.
